Split clips, adjust brightness, and add filters with ease

We’ve covered some of the best free video editing software available for the PC, but sometimes all you need is a quick brightness tweak or audio adjustment, and YouTube’s built-in video editor is more than capable. It’s not terribly complicated to use, but we’ll run you through the basics.

Up your speed by linking two or more drives in RAID 0

For serious PC builders, speed is the name of the game. Too often, storage becomes a bottleneck that holds back even the beefiest CPU. Even with the advent of SSDs, leveraging a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) can drastically reduce boot and loading times. RAID 0 is the easiest way to get more speed out of two or more drives, and lets you use a pretty cool acronym to boot.

How to build a small Devil's Canyon PC

The mission is simple: We wanted to take Intel’s Devil’s Canyon CPU as far as it would go in a compact chassis. For those who don’t know what Devil’s Canyon is, it’s Intel’s newest line of Haswell-K CPUs, which are specifically designed to be overclocked.

Learn how to wring every last bit of performance out of your video card

Overclocking a graphics card used to be more trouble than it was worth, but things have changed. EVGA Precision X and MSI Afterburner are just two of the most popular choices for software overclocking. AMD even bundles its own overclocking solution—AMD OverDrive—with its Catalyst drivers. Wringing more performance out of your graphics card is now as simple as moving a few sliders and testing for stability with a benchmark.

GIFs (or JIFs, depending on who you ask) are the bread and butter of a good Internet conversation these days. While it’s easy to find reaction GIFs with a simple Google search, sometimes it's impossible to find that exact GIF you want. With this in mind, here are two simple ways to make your own animated images.

Productive video editing in less than 60 minutes!

We’re going to venture a guess that not all of Maximum PC’s readers will know the history behind Adobe Premiere, which was the first commonly available digital video editor when released in 1991. The best you could expect from it at the time was postage stamp–size videos of 160 x 120 pixels, but at least we were off and running. Or so we thought. Because the original Adobe Premiere (without “Pro”) had years of problems around synching audio to video. This limited its professional use, and opened the door for Apple's Final Cut to take over.

Netflix, Spotify, and more—all on your TV

It may have started as a media center for the original Xbox, but XBMChas since evolved into a full-fledged application with a huge library of add-ons generated by diehard fans and users. Available on pretty much every platform you’d want to install it on—Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, iOS, and more—it’s a stellar way to get all of your content onto a big screen without having to deal with a mouse and keyboard, unless you want to.

A primer for the budding artist in all of us

We’ve been cataloging amazing video game screenshots in our monthly Graphics Porn feature, so we figured it’s about time we gave a quick primer on how to take stellar screenshots in your favorite games.

This goes beyond Print Screen and Paint. We’re not talking about hastily snapped screens of hilarious moments in Team Fortress 2 or a particularly well-designed cutscene. We do, however, consider utilities like Cheat Engine essential to the process.

Four different ways to download your favorite clips

Streaming YouTube videos can quickly eat up your precious cellular data plan. In fact, most people don't watch videos on the go because of limited data plans. A way around this is to download videos onto a PC, then copy them to your mobile device. We’ve rounded up four ways to download YouTube videos and chosen our favorite of the bunch.

3 free and easy tools to transfer your data from one drive to another

You just bought a brand new shiny SSD and want to throw it into your aging mid-tower PC. But wait, the horror of having to reinstall Windows again and all of your applications begins to set in. If you don’t want to deal with the hassle of reinstalling Windows, you can use a simple cloning utility to clone your old drive to your new SSD. We’ve rounded up three free cloning utilities that are easy to use so you don’t have to go through the effort of reinstalling your OS and applications all over again.